Mark Ward
Bare

The television glowed red with stretchmarks
unable to contain the friction displayed
within perfect bodies light throws shadows,
fables of how the game is played.

It’s easy to subdivide derision,
to overwhelm risk with validation,
hands and skin accepting benediction.
Tonight’s lit with a well-worn negation;

moonlight cloaks the animal, makes it think
the world is a windowless tomorrow
holding steady on the brink of sunlight.
His lithe archetype might drown out the night.

You can burn the worst on overcast days.
You should learn not to yearn for the cause of the blaze.

Mark Ward‘s poems have appeared in Assaracus, Tincture, The Good Men Project, HIV Here & Now, Storm Cellar, Studies in Arts and Humanities, Off the Rocks, The Wild Ones, Vast Sky, and Emerge, as well as in the anthologies Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Myriad Carnival and Not Just Another Pretty Face. He founded Impossible Archetype, a journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. Learn more at astintinyourspotlight.wordpress.com.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is a sonnet. Write an HIV poem in sonnet form. My husband, poet Jason Schneiderman, wrote a whole crown of sonnets about HIV and me in his book Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004). The complete crown is posted with permission here. (You can look up “sonnet crown” online; frankly, I do not see any good online discussions of it, but there are a number of good books out there about poetic forms).

Vernita Hall
I Knew a Man

for Gregory

I knew a man
who could charm the coin from Charon’s hand
or Midas’, too, squeeze lemonade from sand,
hula rings like Saturn, drum thunder like Jupiter
whenever he laughed, and he laughed some.

I knew a man
who could dance on the head of a pin
or the top of a bar. Around the pole he’d spin
like a compass needle. His word—true north.
He never called the shots—they begged to come.

This man, my friend,
could thread a needle with a baseball bat,
eclipse the sun, or wheedle cream from an alley cat.
Always top dog, the black elephant in the room,
he never took a back seat lest he throned it, Paul Bunyan-esque.

The man I knew
could spin a yarn like Rumpelstiltskin
or negotiate extra wishes from a jinn.
His laser eyes could weep a secret out from a stone.
He walked with Jesus upon the waters, two abreast.

Did you know my friend?
He was the father of invention—and a muthuh, too.
Switched the Grim Reaper gay, broke the back of convention.
He rose well-heeled, sprinkled motherwit like seed,
his tongue, oil-slick. He could listen through the tips of his toes.

When Gabriel sounds
that trumpet for the day of rest
New Orleans-style, he’ll strut at the head of the blessed,
arm-in-arm with Peter and Michael, too.
He’ll be leading the band, prompting them their cue,
this man I knew.

Vernita Hall‘s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Philadelphia Stories, Referential, Mezzo Cammin, Whirlwind, Canary, African American Review, Snapdragon, and several anthologies, including Forgotten Women (Grayson Books, 2017). Her poetry collection The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians won the 2016 Moonstone Chapbook Contest, judged by Afaa Michael Weaver. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

We post many elegies for loved one who died of AIDS. Write a poem about someone who did NOT die of AIDS—someone who is living with HIV: maybe someone you love. Poet David Groff wrote an entire collection of poems, Clay (Trio House Press, 2013), about his husband who is living with HIV. You can read a generous excerpt from Clay here.

David Groff
Revival

We made a list of every state
we each had sex in. You won
with 31, delighted: summer stock.
Fifty now and dead, you reappear
made up at Community Café Stage
in Quarryville in performances
of You Can’t Take It with You,
the owner’s son, the suitor,
keen for xylophones and fireworks,
puppyish, blond again, the shot at sex
an encore in eyes I almost know.
On the barn of stage a shooting star,
you strut like a Saturday out of town.
My applause enfolds you like the shroud
Ophelia wore, or Mercutio.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (Illinois, 2002), selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. With Jim Elledge he coedited Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin, 2012). With Philip Clark he coedited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010). With Richard Berman he coedited Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe, 1996). He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, the late Robin Hardy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002). David’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA creative writing program of the City College of New York.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In honor of today’s poet, write a poem that CELEBRATES the life of someone who died of AIDS, rather than a lament. Of course, there’s always that tension in elegy between celebration and lament, but in our experience here at HH&N, we find that lament tends to win out when many poets write about loved ones lost to AIDS. Resist! Resist that impulse to wallow in grief. Of course we grieve! But do we love our loved ones because they tied a sad and tragic death, or because they lived a joyous and creative life? But first and foremost—be a poet!

Abigail Frankfurt
Pablo The Bullet

we are a country called
Never Knew Better
you are King
happy I know
this our counsel
our kitchen table
pass me the needle
don’t splash blood
rig in my pocket—even at the airport
steal me the money—I am your girl
pull out my eye
cut the phone wires
this is together
call me Don’t Care
I am contagious
who owes who anything
choke me harder
my gilded bullet
I’m on your edge
both feet bleeding
yank me back up
your hands are filthy
you rotting corpse
I wasn’t ready
my worsening luck
I don’t believe in
any 9 to 5ing
any House of Jesus
roll of the die
you took the wheel
bled into me
somewhere there is whistling
my stomach sinks
each early April
rise
rise
I am floating
backwards
towards you

Abigail Frankfurt writes, “I am a writer living in NYC. I lost my partner to AIDS in 2008. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem touches on HIV transmission via injecting drug use. Of an estimated 1.2 million people living in the US today, some 170,000 of them were infected by sharing needles, syringes, or other injecting equipment. Write a poem that touches on HIV and injecting drug use. Of course, every poet has their own approach, but we suggest following Emily Dickinson in telling all the truth, but telling it slant. You can be graphic about injecting drug use if you want, but you can also be oblique, metaphorical, allusive, allegorical, etc. First and foremost—be a poet!

Manya Magnus
Jack

As a junior in high school in Berkeley, I was asked to share a job at our local flower shop with a friend, after school and on weekends. She did not last long so I took over all the shifts myself. I found in the back workroom of that flower shop respite from the outside world, where Jack and John and I worked together listening to 80s pop, preparing roses, filling FTD orders from across the wire, manning the cash register on slow days and busy days, like valentine’s day and mothers’ day when the lines would snake around the block. They taught me how to do adult things, like sweep a floor properly, clean up the counter after oneself, count change, have a presentational customer face, which has served me very well, where you let the customer know he or she is right, and you smile, and active listen, and you have empathy—I am sorry that your friend died; I hope your mom feels better; congratulations on your engagement!—and listen to their flower-based questions—are they looking for a sympathy bouquet? What is the best type of lilies to make up with? Are these gardenias from Hawaii?—and have confidence in your answer, even when not quite sure (skills used often in healthcare in later years). Working at a flower shop is more like being a bartender than a retail clerk, because customers come back for the conversations not only the purchase.

John was funny and wry and dry and usually sarcastic but always kind; if he were cast in a 1980s sitcom he’d be the stereotypical gay uncle of the kid protagonist and always get the funny lines. Jack was more reserved, the owner, well respected it seemed through my teenage perception at least. They welcomed me in and never judged; they helped me forget the confusing things going on at home and general upset. When I’d leave the store people would comment that I’d be perfumed in flower and so I was; my clothes and skin would remain fragrant after every shift. When I was very low and ended up in a facility for troubled teens for a week they sent me the Cadillac of all bouquets and I was able to read between the lines of each of the flowers and I laughed; when I came back, they never mentioned anything they just hugged me and told me to get to work.

I came back from college one summer and heard through the grapevine that Jack had died of AIDS. I did not know he was sick, although I was old enough to have been aware of the early days, the first cases, GRID, the first deaths, Reagan. I never was able to confirm this to be the case, though I did go back to the store and no one was still there; I’d wish I’d kept in touch but went away to grow up, so didn’t. This was back in the day before the Internet, when it would have been considered morbid to go to the library and look on the microfiche for someone’s obituary.

In any event, because of Jack I ended up devoting my career to HIV research, 25+ years of working to end the epidemic. He never knew this of course. I think of him often.

Manya Magnus is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she studies novel approaches to HIV prevention and removal of structural barriers. Her books include Essentials of Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2007), Essential Readings in Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2008), Intermediate Epidemiology: Methods that Matter (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2014), and (publishing as Manya DeLeon Miller) The Complete Fertility Organizer (Wiley, 1999).

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In honor of today’s poet, an epidemiologist who studies new approaches to HIV prevention, write a poem that leverages the technical vocabulary of HIV. We suggest using that inimitable medical resource, Wikipedia, to look up some of the following terms and see what gets your creative juices flowing: human immunodeficiency virus; acquired immune deficiency syndrome; retrovirus; virion; capsid; reverse transcriptase; protease; integrase; antiretroviral therapy; viral load; T cell; macrophage; monocyte; lymphocyte; proviral DNA; genetic barrier to resistance…okay, that’s enough for one day!